Degree Project Level: Bachelor’s Rebelling against Society’s Control and Beauty Ideals in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies Series How the Pressure to Be Pretty Can Start a Rebellion Author: Isabella Järnemark Svensson Supervisor: David Gray Examiner: Carmen Zamorano Llena Subject/main field of study: English (literature) Course code: EN2028 Credits: 15 ECTS Date of examination: 30 April 2019 At Dalarna University it is possible to publish the student thesis in full text in DiVA. The publishing is open access, which means the work will be freely accessible to read and download on the internet. This will significantly increase the dissemination and visibility of the student thesis. Open access is becoming the standard route for spreading scientific and academic information on the internet. Dalarna University recommends that both researchers as well as students publish their work open access. I give my/we give our consent for full text publishing (freely accessible on the internet, open access): Yes ☒ No ☐ Dalarna University – SE-791 88 Falun – Phone +4623-77 80 00 Table of Contents Introduction 1 The Notion of Beauty 7 Rebelling against Society 14 Conclusion 19 Works Cited 23 1 Introduction “What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.” (Uglies 279) The Uglies series presents a post-apocalyptic society where everyone turns pretty after their 16th birthday, when they go through a mandatory beauty operation. The main protagonist is a girl named Tally Youngblood and the series follows her and her friends in their rebellion against societal control. The Uglies series is written by Scott Westerfeld and it is a trilogy-plus-one series, with the fourth novel being told from a different point of view. When Tally Youngblood’s new friend Shay runs away to the Smoke, a hidden refuge in the wild, to escape the operation, Tally is brought in by the Special Circumstances, a covert government unit which keeps the city under control. Tally is given a choice; to betray her friends and help find the Smoke or stay “ugly” forever. When Tally finds the Smoke she learns the truth about what a person must sacrifice to become “pretty”. What Tally and most people do not know about the Pretty Operation is that brain lesions are added to specific areas of the brain. The mandatory Pretty Operation is a consequence of a war that happened hundreds of years before Tally’s lifetime. Two of the main reasons behind the war were the extreme exploitation of world resources and heightened conflict among people with different cultures and ethnicities. Conflict among people was still an issue because many continued to view people with different cultures and ethnicities with suspicion. To solve this problem scientists came up with the solution to make everyone pretty because previous research showed that beautiful people lived better lives. 2 However, conflict still existed and in secret the brain lesions were introduced into the Pretty Operation to make people more compliant and unaggressive. To keep an eye on humanity and to make sure that the same mistakes are not repeated the so-called Specials are created. The Special Operation is not given to everyone, but only to those who can defeat the brain lesions on their own. This operation results in the patient becoming intimidatingly beautiful to get immediate obedience and respect. Over the course of the series Tally and her friends struggle to maintain their sense of self after having gone through both the Pretty Operation and the Specials Operation, all while trying to fight off society’s attempts to control them. In order to analyze the dystopian society, the notion of beauty and rebellion in the Uglies series a feminist dystopian theory will be used. The main characteristic of dystopian theory that is relevant for this thesis is the use of dystopian fiction as social criticism. M. Keith Booker analyses the subject of social criticism in dystopian novels in his book The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism, where he states that the issues and conflicts in fictional dystopian societies can be directly linked with our real world societal issues (18-9). The subject of social criticism is also discussed in Booker’s study Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide, where he argues how important imaginative literature is for any culture that needs to see how the societies of today should explore new alternative ways to define themselves. This connects with his statement that dystopian fiction critiques the existing social conditions by expanding certain systems and conditions, such as beauty operations and the current pressure to be physically attractive and placing them into different contexts that reveal their contradictions and flaws (3). This aspect of dystopian 3 fiction is relevant to the thesis since rebelling against society is the ultimate manifestation of social criticism. That dystopian fiction functions as social criticism is discussed by Raffaella Baccolini in her article “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science-Fiction.” She argues that the science fiction genre, which is the genre to which the dystopian novel belongs, has the potential to make readers think critically about their own society. By envisioning different worlds and societies, the reader can see the differences and injustices of somewhere else, which can move the reader to possibly change and act upon this realization (519-520). In Westerfeld’s series it is Tally who functions as the reader of her own world. She is not able to see how controlling and absurd her society is until arriving at the Smoke. She needs to be aware that different kinds of societies exist in order to think critically about her own society. According to Rosemary Moore-Clement in her essay “Challenging the Gods”, Tally begins rebelling against society even before she started to think critically about it. Tally does not act upon her realization with purpose until she has viewed society from a distance. Shay, on the other hand, has viewed society critically for years and she is aware that her desire to rebel comes from society’s need to control its citizens. This is considered by Ann M. M. Childs in her essay “The Incompatibility of Female Friendships and Rebellion”, where she argues that it is Shay’s social criticism that works as the driving force behind her rebellion against society. In the Uglies series it is Tally’s friend Shay who shows Tally another way of looking at their society. Shay already has a critical opinion about their society, and when she runs away to the Smoke she is acting upon her realization about the society she has grown up in. 4 In addition to dystopian theory as social criticism another important part of this thesis is the feminist analysis of beauty constructs in dystopian fiction like the Uglies series. Beauty constructs and the myth surrounding beauty are discussed by Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth, where she states that the relationship between female beauty and female liberation is significant (9). Wolf asserts that women become stereotypes by their culture to fit into the beauty myth of the ideal woman by “flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty” (59). This is relevant since the New Pretty Operation in Uglies does not only turn people into ‘pretties’, it controls them with the use of the brain lesions. This type of social criticism with a feminist perspective is offered by Sonya Sawyer Fritz in her essay “Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young”, where she analyzes rebellious acts performed by defiant teen girls in young adult fiction. Fritz argues that Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series has contributed to the new feminist era and explores the complications that Tally faces for being an empowered young woman and activist. This offers a relevant perspective on the female characters and their rebellion in Uglies. Another author who discusses the role of female rebellion and social criticism is Robin Wasserman in her essay “Best Friends for Never”. Wasserman’s essay examines the main protagonist’s best friend, offering another perspective on how social criticism and feminism can shape a young girl’s choices. The subject of feminism regarding gender roles and dystopian fiction is considered by M. Keith Booker in his article “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy”, where he states that the subject of dystopian fiction often centers around the concept of sexuality, but regardless of 5 this very little has changed or challenged the traditional and conventional notions of gender roles in the dystopian genre. Booker argues that most dystopian novels are traditional in their gender roles, they are places where “men are men and women are women, and in relatively conventional ways” (337). He states that this is because Western civilization has such ingrained patriarchal preconceptions about what is female and what is male. Booker suggests that Western civilization has a deep-seated perception about what constitutes beauty and this can lead to dystopian novels that follow traditional Western norms, concerning matters such as gender roles (337-8). These subjects of gender roles and Western beauty standards in patriarchal societies are discussed by Mary Jeanette Moran in her essay “The Three Faces of Tally Youngblood: Rebellious Identity-Changing in Scott Westerfeld’s “‘Uglies’ Series”. Moran explores why society in the Uglies series still has traditional gender roles, even though everyone must go through the mandatory beautification operation and how that relates to a patriarchal structure in society. Another text that explores the subject of gender roles and femininity in the Uglies series is Victoria Flanagan’s “Girl Parts: The Female Body, Subjectivity and Technology in Posthuman Young Adult Fiction.” Flanagan argues that Uglies challenge today’s “contemporary gender politics” with the utilization of the term ‘pretties’ as an adjective that describes both men and women (43).